


Exequiae

by FidgetyWriter



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Lyrium Addiction, Mage Inquisitor (Dragon Age), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, despite this i promise this is actually a somewhat light-hearted fic, the chantry is real bad, the title is Latin for funeral procession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 19:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16125551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FidgetyWriter/pseuds/FidgetyWriter
Summary: Cullen, ready to take his heart back from the Chantry to give to her, tries to bury the last vestige of his life as a Templar: his lyrium kit.





	Exequiae

“We should bury it,” she says. 

Cullen only half understands the finality of this suggestion, busy tracing the exposed flesh of her shoulder blades with a finger. They’re still half tangled up in one another; mornings are better: she finally has the comfort of her witherstalk and he has less nightmares when she spends the night. But when the dizziness caused by the feel of her hands on him fades, the aching hum returns. 

“Hmm?” he responds, his gaze turning away from The Box (as he’s always called it) back to Margitte next to him. 

“We should bury it,” she says again, stifling a yawn in the middle. “So you stop thinking about it.” 

Cullen always likes to think of himself as a subtle man, despite Mia’s insistences throughout their childhood that the only reason she kept winning chess was because he wore his entire thought process on his face the entire game, but even his sister’s uncanny observance paled in comparison to this. Margitte had learned how he liked his tea (two sugar cubes settled in with the steeping leaves) before they’d spoken more than a few stilted conversations at Haven, bringing in four cups to the War Room one morning not two weeks after the destruction at the Conclave with one brewed perfectly for each advisor and herself without ever being asked to do so. Naturally, she knew when his gaze drifted away from whatever was at hand to The Box. 

“I—“ The thought fills him with less dread than he feared such a suggestion might bring, but there is dread nonetheless. He hasn’t taken lyrium once in nearly half a year, not since he’d gotten so angry he threw The Box and nearly dropped dead of shame when Margitte entered his quarters at that exact moment and the vials shattered only inches from her head.

She’d still said “I know you can do this,” after his ten profuse apologies. 

_"I know you can do this_ ” had been sprinkled throughout the letters she sent from Emprise du Lion and The Hissing Wastes, and the idea that she was out there believing in him was enough to stay his hand even when the migraines caused nosebleeds and the nightmares choked him in his bed.

But The Box was still there, tucked away on a shelf behind his desk, shoved in between a stack of papers concerning Orlesian politics that he had tried (and failed) to read four times and the little clay nug Rosalie had sent him with a note saying “Bran and I made this for you. If you break it, I’ll kill you”. 

It was always an option. Just in case the nightmares were too much. Just in case the headaches too unbearable. Just in case. 

_Meredith justified, for all intents and purposes, an illegal Tranquil branding of a mage who had passed his Harrowing to Cullen late one night. He’d been so uneasy at the direct flouting of Chantry authority he’d gone directly to her quarters past midnight and asked under what pretense she commanded such an act. He was twenty-five, it was a year before Anders blew up half of Kirkwall._

_“What was his crime?” he’d asked through the tiny crack in the door Meredith opened at his knock. He suspected he’d caught her sleeping._

_“Cavorting with a recruit. The redhead from Starkhaven.”_

_“Did he...force himself upon her?”_

_“No, but I had to send her away for it. You know what lust can cause a mage to do, Knight Captain. I am merely being cautious. Just in case.”_

 

Margitte is looking over at him, face half buried in a pillow, with such pretty, expectant eyes that he feels his resistance crumble. 

“We should bury it,” he agrees. 

~~~~~~~~~~~  
They ride out at midday. The weather is the closest it ever gets to sweltering in this part of Ferelden that spends nine months out of the year in various states of frozen. Cullen catches Blackwall (no...Thom Rainer--he will no longer call the man by a name stolen from a dead Warden) give Margitte a wink when she asks for his assistance in saddling up her trusty steed, Charlie, and another for Cullen. She gives Thom a playful tap on the arm in response, and Cullen stands in awe, yet again, at how easily Margitte has managed to let go of the knowledge that her mentor very narrowly escaped a gallows death for his role in a slaughter.

Neither of them are particularly good riders--Margitte once confessed her propensity to “mysteriously disappear” whenever the tutor came to give the three Trevelyan girls riding lessons, and Cullen’s fall from a horse at age eight, and subsequent broken wrist, had cured him of any inclination toward the creatures. She learned, however, to trust Charlie in their year and a half together, so she hooks his rein to Cullen’s horse to prevent what Blackwall (Thom) told them is its nagging propensity to wander off.

He is intimately aware of The Box tucked down near his breastbone. He knows this is a ridiculous place to keep it, even with his fur wrappings it protrudes from his chest like a diseased third limb. Years ago, when he took his vows, he lay awake the first night after taking his very first dose of lyrium, convinced he could feel it in his veins. It felt almost like a new heartbeat in his forearms, separate from his own. The effects grew less noticeable as time passed, and by the time he arrived in Kirkwall, tired and broken, he welcomed the slight uptick in heart rate a dose of lyrium caused as it reminded him he was still alive, still able to do the duty he’d sworn himself to.

Now, The Box feels eerily warm against him. He knows it’s his imagination, knows how very irrational he’s being, but it seems as though there’s that second heartbeat again. It’s beating furiously against his chest, angry and afraid, like the terrified flutter of his own nearly thirteen years ago when he’d begged, on his knees, the demons Uldred summoned for death rather than another rape of his mind.

Suddenly he hates The Box again. He digs his heels into the ribs of his horse, and she comes to life at the spurring, eager to run. Margitte shoots him a brief look of concern but urges Charlie to follow the new pace.

“Here,” he says after a few moments of silence. He barely waits for the horse to slow down before alighting. His feet hit the ground with a firm crunch on the dying grass below.

“Here?” Margitte calls as she brings the horses to a halt and circles them back around to him.

He doesn’t know why this nondescript patch of land, not even marked by a tree or boulder, feels right. He’ll never find it again once they bury The Box. Cullen wonders if that may be the point.

He offers Margitte a hand to step down, but she still stumbles on contact with the ground. She laughs breathlessly, leaning into him.

“I can stick that landing at Halamshiral in tall-heeled shoes but not here, with you, in boots.”

“Careful, Inquisitor, or I may think you simply feigned a stumble to fall into me.”

“I admit it. You’ve caught me, Commander.”

“Quite literally.”

She pulls two small garden hoes from the bag draped over Charlie.

“No magic,” she says, handing him one. “Let’s work.”  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
It _is_ work despite the hole for The Box only requiring less than a quarter of a meter for depth and even less for width.Though the topmost layer of soil has thawed in the early Ferelden autumn, everything below it is stiffly compacted, always ready for the next frost. Margitte pulls her hair up and out of her face. It is the same way she wore it when they first met over 18 months ago, in the War Room at Haven. His heart had jumped into his throat at the initial sight of her, alarmed that this unknown mage, with a new glowing mark on her hand that could mend a torn sky, was also so pretty.

“Will this work?” she asks, rocking back on her heels and dragging a dirty hand across her brow. A streak of dirt smears across half her forehead.

The Box, or maybe just the lyrium in it, is suddenly afraid. He knows this isn’t his imagination--a life pulse, not his own, hammers against his sternum. Though he’d stopped taking it months ago, the lyrium knew it was only one bad enough nightmare away from rising to quell his shaking. He feels his own heart swell with a surge of rage. Why has he held onto it for so long? Just in case. Just in case. He should be better than this, and he hates that he isn’t.

“Cullen.”

Margitte reaches over and takes his right hand in both of hers, the mark on her left tingling slightly against his skin. He realizes he’s pulled The Box out of his shirt at some point and is staring down at it in the hand Margitte isn’t holding. He does not remember doing this. The sickening hammer on his sternum is still there. It is his own heart, after all, not The Box’s.

He drops it, as if it's burned him, and it falls neatly into the grave they’ve dug for it. Chest aching, he swallows an uncharacteristic curse that rises in his mouth and snatches up a handful of loose dirt. His fingers stiffen. The rapid hammer may be his own pulse, but the voice that floats out of The Box doesn’t care.

“ _C-u-u-u-llen,_ ” it calls in the sing-song voice of the desire demon whose memory still haunts him over a decade later. “ _Why would you bury meee? Haven’t I been your only true friend this whole time?_ ”

“No!”

The dirt in his hand hits the lid of The Box with a resounding thump as he throws it down into the face of this vestige of his torment. He is suddenly painfully aware of his surroundings once more. He is kneeling in the dirt. Charlie is shredding a nearby patch of grass into lunch. Margitte’s hands are warm on his. The Box is as silent as it should be. 

Margitte follows silent suit, shoving another clump of dirt back into the hole with her heel. The more they shovel back in, the quieter the lingering terror in his chest grows.

When the hole is full and The Box gone from sight, Margitte tamps down on the dirt with the handle of the hoe.

“Do you want to spit on it?” she asks, grinning slightly.

“No.”

He laughs at the idea, feeling lighter, almost giddy. He thinks of what he’ll put on the shelf in The Box’s place, next to the clay nug. He has a wild, brief idea of another sort of box--of one with a ring in it, lined with emeralds, of course, her favorite stone.

They both make a point to have Charlie and the other mount trot over the slightly raised mound of earth, crushing it down further so it is barely recognizable as any different from the rest of the field. He’s comforted by the idea that nature will take care of the rest.

“I’m proud of you,” she says at the exact moment he says “Thank you.”

She smiles again at his words, raising a hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her fingers come back even dirtier.

“Did I have dirt on my head this _whole time_?” she asks.

“No,” he tells her, trying not to laugh at her innocent incredulity. “Just most of it.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?!”

She swats at his knee, though her smile gives her away. He grabs her hand and pulls it toward his chest, forcing Charlie to drift even closer to the horse next to him.

“Thank you,” Cullen repeats, holding her fingers to where The Box had rested against his chest on their ride out. The touch causes his heart to flutter again, and he supposes, maybe, it doesn’t belong to The Box anymore, but to her entirely.


End file.
